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Public school enrollment decline is steepest in LAUSD and L.A. County

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Schools in Los Angeles County and especially those in the L.A. Unified School District are seeing the steepest decline in enrollment in California, based on new state data posted Thursday.

Across California, enrollment dropped by 1.3% — about 75,000 students — over the last year, a percentage decline that is about average compared with 39 states that have so far released enrollment figures for the current school year. All 39 have recorded enrollment decreases, based on an analysis by the California Department of Education. States with a larger percentage decline include Hawaii, New Hampshire and New York.

“Declining school enrollment in California reflects the national trend,” said Elizabeth Sanders, a spokesperson for the state Department of Education. In addition, “the data shows that some California families are relocating to less expensive suburban communities like Elk Grove and Vacaville.”

The statewide figures correlate to declining birth rates nationwide, although other factors are in play locally, including in Los Angeles County, such as housing costs, a decline in immigration and aggressive federal efforts to deport undocumented immigrants.

“There are some surprises in these data, but the decline itself shouldn’t be surprising,” said Thomas J. Kane, director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard. “Declining birth rates inevitably mean declining enrollment. The size of the decline should be manageable — but only if schools adjust their plans now, rather than wait.”

Typical ways of coping with declining enrollment including closing schools and reducing the number of employees. Both are painful measures for school communities and have been resisted in the Los Angeles Unified School District and elsewhere.

This week, LAUSD officials just barely headed off a strike by agreeing to significant employee raises as well as by rescinding about 200 layoffs and agreeing to hundreds of new hires of counselors, school psychologists and other student support staff. The school system has not identified campuses that could be closed.

Los Angeles County, with 80 school districts, has far more students than any other California county, so its effect on statewide enrollment always will be significant. Over the last year enrollment drops were pronounced, pulling down statewide numbers.

Los Angeles County public school enrollment for the 2025-26 academic year decreased from the prior year by 32,953 students, or 2.6%, to 1,242,816. That drop would equate to the disappearance of the entire Moreno Valley Unified School District, which is one of the 25 largest school systems in the state.

The county decrease represents 44% of the statewide decline. By comparison, the county comprises about 22% of the state’s students.

For L.A. Unified, the decline was 16,765 students, or 4.5%. L.A. Unified’s share of the statewide decrease is 22.4%. The district has about 7% of the state’s public school students.

Per the state numbers, the L.A. Unified enrollment is 353,065 and was 369,830 last year.

L.A. Unified has a different and larger enrollment figure based on a different tabulation system, but the percentage decrease is similar to what the state calculated — and it was no surprise to district officials when asked for their reaction.

District officials also noted state figures showing that enrollment is lower, too, for homeschooling, private schools and charter schools. Charters are privately operated public schools.

“Los Angeles Unified’s enrollment trends reflect the same broader demographic shifts impacting school systems across California and the nation,” officials said in a statement. “Enrollment declined across all school types this year, driven largely by long-term factors such as declining birth rates and changes in migration patterns due to cost of living.”

“Like other large urban districts, Los Angeles Unified is also navigating additional local pressures, including housing affordability and the impact of federal immigration enforcement policies, which have contributed to a more pronounced decline in our communities.”

School district critics say the management of the school system itself must bear some blame, although demographic experts lend support to the district analysis.

It’s “quite possible that some of this decline is driven by the increased scale and intensity of immigration enforcement,” said Stanford University professor Thomas S. Dee. “I’ve found in prior research that immigration enforcement reduces enrollment by causing some to flee and deterring newcomers.”

In terms of raw numbers, Santa Ana Unified, which lost 2,291 students, follows L.A. Unified in declining enrollment. That’s a 6.4% drop since last year. Immigration enforcement also has fallen heavily on families in that school system.

School systems with higher enrollment include Elk Grove Unified, which gained 1,097 students, a 1.7% increase. Vacaville Unified enrolled 557 more students, a 4.9% increase. Counties with higher enrollment included San Joaquin, Placer and Sutter.

Mixed picture for private and home schooling

There was a year-over-year decline across all school types.

Schools operated by traditional school districts dropped 1.4%, almost exactly the same as the statewide numbers. This reflects that most students, about 5.73 million, are in public schools.

Charter schools dropped slightly statewide, about 0.3%.

The number of students being homeschooled dropped 3.7%. For data purposes, a home school is defined as a private school with fewer than six students. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, in the 2018-19 school year, there were just under 25,000 homeschoolers. The number peaked in 2020-21, at the height of the pandemic campus closures, at nearly 60,000. The current figure is 49,365.

Private school enrollment dropped 6.6% compared with last year; it’s now a little less than before the pandemic.

In 2018-19, private school enrollment approached 500,000. Enrollment dropped early in the pandemic, then peaked in 2022-23. The current enrollment is 461,650 students, a decrease of 32,814 from last year.

In the big picture, said Stanford’s Dee, “we see continued evidence that the families that left the public school system during the pandemic haven’t really returned.”

UC Berkeley education professor Bruce Fuller focused on the recent private school decline, noting that “fewer parents appear able to afford private schools.”

He also was drawn to another figure — an increase in the number of families taking advantage of transitional kindergarten, which became fully available across the state to 4-year-olds for the current school year.

That enrollment figure is 213,313, up 20.1% over last year.

“Free TK is growing in popularity, especially among middle-income Angelenos who earlier faced daunting child-care bills,” Fuller said. “The downside is that scores of nonprofit preschools have gone under after losing their 4-year-olds.”

Overall, the declining birth rate “continues to wreak havoc with the fragile vitality of public schools,” Fuller added. “The irony is that steadily rising education attainment, notably enjoyed by young Latina mothers, leads to bearing fewer children.”

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NASA Study Challenges Theories on Where the Ingredients for Life Came From

The question of how life began here on Earth, or how simple organisms emerged from chemical compounds, remains a bit of a mystery. While scientists have confirmed through fossil evidence and the geological record that life began roughly 4 billion years ago on the seafloor (around hydrothermal vents), it is still unclear how the ingredients for life came to Earth. The generally-held view is that they were brought here by comets and asteroids from the outer Solar System, which also delivered Earth’s surface water.

This theory states that planetesimals delivered these elements to the inner Solar System during the Late Heavy Bombardment, thought to have occurred between 4.1 and 3.8 billion years ago. However, a new NASA-supported study is providing new information about how primordial Earth acquired life-essential elements (LEEs). Their findings, published in the journal Science Advances, indicate that Jupiter likely played a key role in the process.

The research team hails from Rice University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. As they indicate, the timing of the deliver of LEEs to Earth remains debated, as does the geochemistry of the planetesimals involved. Traditional models attribute it to outer Solar System chondrites, stony meteorites that formed two to four million years after the first solids formed in the Solar System. However, as the team noted, this accretion age rules them out as the earliest source of LEEs.

*Artist’s impression of a circumsolar debris disk, from which systems of planets form. Credit: NASA*

To break it down, all life on Earth requires the same basic elements, known by the acronym CHNOPS: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. These elements formed through the fusion of hydrogen and helium in the first generation of stars (Population III), which were then dispersed throughout the cosmos as clouds of gas and dust when these massive stars went supernova at the end of their short lifespans (tens of millions of years). These and other heavy elements (including silica, iron, and various metals) then coalesced to form subsequent generations of stars and planets.

Roughly 4.6 billion years ago, the Sun formed from a collection of this gas and dust (nebula), experiencing gravitational collapse at the center. The remaining material formed a disk around the new star, slowly accreting to form the Solar planets and planetesimals. What material remained, in the form of asteroids and comets, settled into different orbits, most into the Main Asteroid Belt and the Kuiper Belt. Others, meanwhile, fell into the orbits of planets – like Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) or Jupiter’s Trojan and Greek populations.

Over time, many of these objects have crossed Earth’s orbit, impacted the surface, and were recovered as meteorites. The study of these objects provides a window into the early Solar System, a much more chaotic time when Earth was still in formation. Meteorites fall into two categories, both of which originated from planetesimals that formed at different times in our system. These include dense metallic objects (iron meteorites) and stony chondrites, the latter of which constitute the majority of those found on Earth.

The oldest planetesimals are the source of iron meteorites, while chondrites originate from the second generation that formed 2-3 million years later. While some evidence points to chondrites from the outer Solar System delivering the ingredients for life late in Earth’s formation, scientists continue to debate which type of meteorites delivered Earth’s stock of LEEs. The new study suggests that things might have happened differently than traditional models suggest.

Using laboratory experiments and geochemical models, the team reconstructed a map of phosphorus-nitrogen (P/N) ratios across the early Solar System. Their results showed that during the first generation of planetesimals (iron), objects had a higher ratio of P/N in the outer Solar System, which decreased toward the inner Solar System. This trend was reversed in the second generation, where chondrites had higher P/N ratios in the inner Solar System.

*An illustration of our solar system. The asteroid belt lies between Mars and Jupiter, separating our system into the inner and outer regions. NASA/JPL-Caltech*

The team theorized that during the first generation, an outward flow of material raised the P/N ratio in the outer Solar System. This changed with the arrival of Jupiter, whose gravitational influence restricted the movement of phosphorus and nitrogen from the inner to outer Solar System. This meant that when the second generation of planetesimals appeared, those that orbited within the inner Solar System were left with a higher P/N ratio than their counterparts that orbited farther from the Sun.

These results suggest that, contrary to previous models, Earth acquired its phosphorus and nitrogen (both essential to life) primarily from the inner Solar System, without additional contributions from the outer Solar System. Their findings are reinforced by geochemical accretion models showing that Earth’s present-day P/N signature is best reproduced by inner Solar System planetesimals, regardless of whether they are related to iron or chondrite meteorites. As Rajdeep Dasgupta of Rice University, the senior author on the study, said in a NASA press release:

For our own solar system, Jupiter’s presence and growth history, indeed, seem to have played a critical role in determining the distribution of the basic chemical ingredients necessary for habitable worlds. It remains an open question whether a life-essential element budget similar to Earth’s can be established without a Jupiter-like planet in the population.

“The study suggests that Earth acquired its inventory of the life-essential elements phosphorus and nitrogen primarily from the inner solar system, without requiring a significant contribution from outer solar system chondrites,” added Pathak. As for the other LEEs, the means through which they were delivered to Earth billions of years ago remain to be seen and will be the subject of future research.

Further Reading: NASA, Science

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Fugitive wanted for 2 killings found in Laos after 8 years

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An 8-year-old manhunt for a suspect in two California killings came to an end this week after a South Korean national was detained abroad and returned to the United States to face murder charges.

Myung Jin Kim, 31, was wanted in connection with two killings, including a botched murder-for-hire plot in San Jose in 2016 and the killing of Kim’s friend in the parking lot of a CVS in Westminster two years later.

Prosecutors filed an arrest warrant for Kim in November 2018, but he is believed to have fled and eluded authorities for eight years.

Myung Jin Kim, 31, was taken into custody by Laotian authorities in late May.

“Mr. Kim’s cowardly acts of violence finally caught up with him, despite being halfway across the globe,” said Patrick Grandy, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, in a statement.

Kim is believed to have hired a hitman for the ambush and killing of a man in San Jose on June 27, 2016.

Police say the victim was shot in his car after stopping by a residential neighborhood. But the investigation by San Jose police determined the hitman had killed the wrong person.

For years, however, no arrest warrant was issued for Kim.

Then on Sept. 5, 2018, Kim was suspected of shooting and killing his friend, 26-year-old Christopher Kim, in the parking lot of a CVS in Westminster after the two argued over money.

Authorities say Kim allegedly shot his friend six times in front of his girlfriend and then fled on foot.

On Nov. 20, 2018, police in Orange County issued an arrest warrant for Kim.

San Jose police continued their investigation into the 2016 killing as well and, on Feb. 3, 2020, an arrest warrant was issued for Kim for allegations of murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the botched murder-for-hire plot.

Kim eluded law enforcement for years until December 2025 when, according to a statement by the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, Westminster Police Department, FBI, San Jose Police and Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office, he was found living in Laos. Kim was taken into custody for alleged immigration violations, including using fraudulent travel documents.

Orange and Santa Clara county officials worked with the FBI and U.S. marshals to locate and bring Kim back to the states to face felony charges.

Kim was booked into Anaheim Police Department jail Tuesday, and he was transported to Santa Clara County on Wednesday.

Federal officials noted Kim was the first person detained and returned to the United States from Laos.